"Didn't I say?" Dale asked. "Henry's blind."
Paintings went up on the living-room walls, ascended the stairwell, moved into the bedrooms. Jack put up a couple of small pictures in the upstairs bathroom and the little half bath on the ground floor. Dale's arms began to ache from holding the frames while Jack marked the places where the nails would go in. After the first three paintings, he had removed his necktie and rolled up his sleeves, and he could feel sweat trickling out of his hair and sliding down his face. His unbuttoned collar had soaked through. Jack Sawyer had worked as hard or harder than he, but looked as if he had done nothing more strenuous than think about dinner.
"You're like an art collector, huh?" Dale said. "Did it take a long time to get all these paintings?"
"I don't know enough to be a collector," Jack said. "My father picked up most of this work back in the fifties and sixties. My mother bought a few things, too, when she saw something that turned her on. Like that little Fairfield Porter over there, with the front porch and a lawn and the flowers."
The little Fairfield Porter, which name Dale assumed to be that of its painter, had appealed to him as soon as he and Jack had pulled it out of its crate. You could hang a picture like that in your own living room. You could almost step into a picture like that. The funny thing was, Dale thought, if you hung it in your living room, most of the people who came in would never really notice it at all.
Jack had said something about being glad to get the paintings out of storage. "So," Dale said, "your mom and dad gave them to you?"
"I inherited them after my mother's death," Jack said. "My father died when I was a kid."
"Oh, darn, I'm sorry," Dale said, snapped abruptly out of the world into which Mr. Fairfield Porter had welcomed him. "Had to be tough on you, losing your dad so young." He thought Jack had given him the explanation for the aura of apartness and isolation that seemed always to envelop him. A second before Jack could respond, Dale told himself he was bullshitting. He had no idea how someone wound up being like Jack Sawyer.
"Yeah," Jack said. "Fortunately, my mother was even tougher." Dale seized his opportunity with both hands. "What did your folks do? Were you brought up in California?"
"Born and raised in Los Angeles," Jack said. "My parents were in the entertainment industry, but don't hold that against them. They were great people."
Jack did not invite him to stay for supper — that was what stuck with Dale. Over the hour and a half it took them to hang the rest of the pictures, Jack Sawyer remained friendly and good-humored, but Dale, who was not a cop for nothing, sensed something evasive and adamant in his friend's affability: a door had opened a tiny crack, then slammed shut. The phrase "great people" had placed Jack's parents out of bounds. When the two men broke for another beer, Dale noticed a pair of bags from a Centralia grocery next to the microwave. It was then nearly 8:00, at least two hours past French County's suppertime. Jack might reasonably have assumed that Dale had already eaten, were his uniform not evidence to the contrary.
He tossed Jack a softball about the hardest case he had ever solved and sidled up to the counter. The marbled red tips of two sirloin steaks protruded from the nearest bag. His stomach emitted a reverberant clamor. Jack ignored the thunder roll and said, "Thornberg Kinderling was right up there with anything I handled in L.A. I was really grateful for your help." Dale got the picture. Here was another locked door. This one had declined to open by as much as a crack. History was not spoken here; the past had been nailed shut.